One of the things that sticks in my memory most strongly from our trip last December to Oahu is the rainbows. Every day, at least one rainbow. It just became this thing I did every morning: Get up, make the coffee, go out to our balcony, look off to the right, and see a rainbow. I even saw my first moonbow there.
Western New York is not nearly so prolific in the rainbow department.
But the other night, our WNY skies put on a show. A series of thunderstorms rolled in from Lake Erie, and in their wake, the sunlight did its thing. It started with the faintest wisp of a rainbow, barely there:
As the evening progressed, the bit of rainbow brightened…
…until finally…
And the rainbows were impressive in their duration, too: this one lingered in the sky for a good, long time. On the second pic above, we were heading home from dinner at a gluten-free restaurant in Lockport, which is way up north, about 30 miles. I took that full rainbow shot from the car in I-990, north of the Amherst UB campus, after about ten miles of driving. (Safety note: I was not driving! The Wife was driving. I was not doing sky-photography while driving.)
Another ten or twelve miles later, as we were approaching downtown Buffalo on I-190, there was this.
That just made me all kinds of happy.
Meanwhile, in the other direction, out over the lake, the sky was doing this:
Obviously nobody is ever going to mistake Buffalo for Waikiki, all right? But the sky here can really put on a show sometimes. And in Buffalo you can see sunset over water.
This photo was shared on a Facebook group I follow, called “Olean NY: Memories in Time”, which is just that: memories of the Olean, NY region through the years. This is a photo taken by drone from the top of what is locally called “Rock City Hill”, the high mountaintop just south of Olean, and one of the highest points in the region. This view is northwest, toward the village of Allegany, where I grew up.
My issues with the region aside, New York’s Southern Tier is a hauntingly beautiful place. I don’t exactly miss it, but…I do miss views like this.
Full version available here. Original Facebook post here.
Last weekend we attended the Sterling Renaissance Festival for the first time since 1999! Huzzah!!!
Knights at play!
Obviously the Festival didn’t happen in 2020, and I’m honestly not sure if it tried to happen last year, but in any event we did not attend if it did. This year, though, we finally returned. Sadly, The Wife has to wait until next year to go back! She was unable to go this year due to recent foot surgery (everything’s fine, just a tendonitis issue that needed fixing). The Renfest does the best it can, but the nature of its location–it’s literally built onto a hillside–makes it very difficult for folks with mobility issues. We just didn’t want to go through all that struggle, unfortunately.
So this year it was just The Daughter and I. Still, we had a great time. There were occasional moments when The Wife’s absence was felt, none moreso than, of all things, the roaming pickle vendor. He’s a fellow who roams around with a wagon loaded with giant, juicy pickles, which are one of The Wife’s favorite treats. Usually at some point we see the Pickle Guy and The Wife says, “You should go buy me a pickle.” And I do. Alas, ’twas not to be this time!
(In an amusing moment, at the late-afternoon joust, the pickle vendor finally sold out, so he shouted “FREE PICKLE…JUICE!” And a couple of people actually took empty water bottles to take him up on the offer. I do not always understand my fellow humans.)
This year, I finally was able to partly dress for attendance at the Faire!
Note my pendant watch…I’m representing Renaissance dress, steampunk, AND modern workwear here. Were I a knight, I would be Sir Eclectic!
Yes, I know that this outfit is anachronistic to a Faire set in a faux-Elizabethan village. The shirt is a Renfest-style shirt, though, so I was only half a walking anachronism.
(I dressed like this as an experiment, too, regarding how to dress in high heat. I’ll save those thoughts for another post. Yes, I was hot…but I don’t think shorts-and-a-tee-shirt would have made me feel any cooler.)
The drive from home to the Faire is a long one, roughly two-and-a-half hours. The first two-thirds of the drive is a boring hundred miles down the New York State Thruway, but after that, it’s a lovely drive through the hill country north of the Finger Lakes and into the Lake Ontario watershed.
I love this house and I look forward to seeing it every year as we drive by. It looks like it’s been there since the War of 1812. I don’t know a thing about this house’s history.
A trombone in a Renaissance group? Yes! While the modern trombone didn’t exist yet, the forerunner instrument, called a sackbut, was quite common.Daily parade. God save the Queen!Acrobatics and such. I didn’t see this whole performance, but just the very end when she did this.“You can’t tell a day from a knight without a program!”I scoped out my spot to watch the joust early, 45 minutes early, to be exact. By this time I was glad to sit with a cool beverage and do some people-watching.“A mighty whack?” “His skull will CRACK!”
In terms of food, we really didn’t eat much at the Faire! Our tradition is the big roasted turkey legs that are dripping in barbecue sauce. And when I say ‘dripping’, I mean, DRIPPING. I was almost successful at getting through it without getting sauce and turkey grease on my white shirt, but…yeah. Almost.
I’ve already got it washed out, thankfully! I know what to do in such events.
Later on, I enjoyed a wine slushie. This was my only alcohol at the Faire. That shit’s expensive, yo!
(On the way home we stopped for dinner, at a fried chicken joint we love in Webster, NY. We had chicken and waffles, which is a killer combo.)
Some candids I snapped:
These two had the best costumes I saw all day. The woman on the right had a stunning femme-fatale pirate thing going on. Magnificent!
The Queen and her Royal Party, taking in the jousting entertainment.A knight addresses the crowd, encouraging lusty cheers.One of the attendants for the joust.I’ve seen Milady at the Faire before. Usually she is on horseback. This time she was not.
Not a great shot. I was trying for the stilt-walker, not the fellow in the hat or what might be his family.
A fine knight, astride his noble beast!A pirate lass. Fantastic costume work here!Another fine costume. That puppet on her shoulder articulates! There’s a wire that runs down through your clothes and you can twitch the wire in certain ways to make the puppet lift its wings, turn its head, and the like. I know this because The Daughter bought one.
At day’s end, we were tired and fulfilled and happy…but also sad because the Faire was over for another year. (I mean, we could go back, there are a few weekends left, but we have other happy events coming up as well….) I did my best to look reflective and melancholy at the prospect of returning to real life after a day in an Elizabethan England that wasn’t also a rather violent realm of short lives and many poxes….
There was still some beauty to be had, though. One of my quirks regarding road trips–and there’s a very good chance that I inherited this from my father–is that on any out-and-back-again trip, I don’t like coming home the same way I went out. In this case, that means that instead of driving south from the Faire to the Thruway, I take Route 104 along the Lake Ontario shore back to Rochester, and then I-490 back to the Thruway for the last 35 miles or so. This is a lovely road that goes over Irondequoit Bay…
…and through downtown Rochester.
Alas, there comes a time when our revelries are now ended. So, we shall see you again next year, people of Warwickshire!
Oh, and the title of this post comes from, naturally enough, Camelot:
I love the full-screen shots I can take with my phone.
One of my favorite things about walking in the woods is the way the sunlight breaks through in spots, dappling the forest floor in pools of golden light while other spots remain shrouded. Here are several shots of just that:
Two shots of the Dumas Bridge, first from the southeast end, and then from the northwest. Same place, same camera, but two different vantage points make for very different moods in the photos!
Yes, I photographed a couple of photographers. I saw them several times on this particular walk. They were intently photographing things up close with those long-lensed cameras. (I enjoy my photography, but not enough to gear up to that degree…though occasionally I do find it tempting to try to move beyond the limitations of my phone’s cameras, amazing as they are, and my now seven-year-old point-and-shoot camera.)
Toward the end of our visit this big military plane flew overhead. I’m not sure what kind of plane this is.Two adventurers, one of whom is thinking about the bowl of water and the air conditioning in the car.
A look at the unbelievably fascist document that is the official platform of the Texas Republican Party:
The fundamentalist religious fervor perhaps extends most strongly to gay rights and others of alternative sexual lifestyles. The platform directly declares that “Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice” and that “We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity.” §§ 143–144 (p. 21). The Republican platform seeks to ban gay marriage.
And that’s just one example of the awfulness therein.
The press does not want to have a direct conversation with you about what’s really at the heart of Republican messaging. As a former Republican who now consistently votes for the Democratic Party in US elections, I will. When I came to realize what the true message of the Republican Party was, I was out, and have been voting Democratic ever since.
Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:
They can tell people what to do.
You cannot tell them what to do.
This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (we will discuss this later in the piece), but this is the basic formula.
By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).
Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.
It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked.
I don’t see the path out. Even if we were able to pack the Courts with jurists who believe in now outdated concepts like stare decisis all that would mean would be that we would be acknowledging that the Supreme Court is an unelected super-legislature. It actually always has been, but before this there were recognized limits on how far the Court could go. That’s gone now.
Increasingly we’re in a place where the only way to really fix things is to blow it all up and start over with an all-new Constitution, and when you consider how the one we have was a messy document full of compromises and good-enough’s that none of the rich white men who wrote it even liked very much, well, what are our chances of getting it right?
This has been an interesting phenomenon to watch unfold the last month or so: a song by 80s singer Kate Bush featured prominently in an episode of the new season of Stranger Things, which has in turn led to an enormous resurgence of interest in Bush herself. The Internet and social media have exploded with discussions of Bush and her songs. I am always happy to see older cultural material get another crack at the limelight; we are too focused on the new-and-shiny as a culture, and it depresses me that lots of good things disappear if they don’t have their Big Moment quickly enough when they’re new.
In my particular case this is helpful because somehow I managed to completely miss Kate Bush in the 80s. I have no memory of her music at all, none whatsoever. I don’t know how this came to happen, but I have a few suspicions, and it had to do with (a) the music I was consuming in 1985 or so, and (b) how I was consuming it. I liked rock and pop a great deal back then! I spent too many hours in front of MTV, and I owned a lot of rock and pop records. But even so, most of my music listening around that point focused strongly on classical, and that didn’t let up until…well, it hasn’t, actually, though I’ve added other genres along the way.
My consumption of rock and pop had nothing at all to do with the usual way of hearing such music, the radio; in the Southern Tier there wasn’t all that much radio at all other than what was powerful enough to reach that far from Buffalo, and when we were driving around, my father asserted the “Driver chooses the music!” rule, which meant country music a lot of the time. So as far as pop and rock went, if I didn’t hear them on MTV, I didn’t hear them at all. I don’t know if Kate Bush made music videos, but I don’t recall seeing them much, if she did.
And that just means I have something new to explore!
Since July 4th is a time when many enjoy fireworks, here is this image of a supernova that looks a lot like a fireworks explosion. Explosions of actual stars are a focus for scientists who hope to better understand their births, lives, and deaths and how they interact with their surroundings. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2015, astronomers have studied one particular explosion that may provide clues to the dynamics of other, much larger stellar eruptions. This is an image of GK Persei, an object that became a sensation in the astronomical world in 1901 when it suddenly appeared as one of the brightest stars in the sky for a few days.
Until yesterday, I had never walked through Delaware Park.
In Buffalo, this is almost a kind of heresy. Delaware Park is Buffalo’s equivalent to New York City’s Central Park: it is the biggest of Buffalo’s public parks, the one with the most variety in terms of things to do and see, all of it tucked into an energized urban environment. I’ve driven through or around Delaware Park many times (among other things, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is on the park’s western edge), but somehow, in all my years of living in The 716, I’ve never actually stopped to spend a bit of quality time in Delaware Park.
Until yesterday.
What was more is that The Dee-oh-gee and I were there shortly after sunrise.
I am not a morning person–at least, I am not a sunrise person. We were all up that early because we had to whisk The Wife to a local medical facility for a scheduled procedure (she’s fine, just tendonitis in a foot that wasn’t responding to physical therapy), and of course we had Cane ride along with us; after depositing The Wife at the hospital where the thing was being done, I decided to take Cane someplace for a walk before heading home. I thought to go to Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, but I was in the vicinity of Delaware Park, and as I drove through it, I thought, Hey, why not walk right here?
Living in Buffalo’s Southtowns, Delaware Park is far enough off my normal beaten path that it simply has never been a destination of its own. That should probably change, and soon. For now, though, I’m happy to have been there on an early morning in June. It had been a cool night but was warming up, which made the waters misty in the golden light.
In light like that, even a distant cloud of gnats or whatever insects these were can be beautiful, as they catch the sun:
Geese:
And many magnificent trees:
The best thing I saw yesterday was a great egret. We kept interrupting this bird as we walked along the path. There it would be, fifty feet or so ahead of us, and then it would fly farther down the lake as we approached. This happened several times until finally it took wing and flew all the way back down the length of the lake; we didn’t see it again after that. But what an impressive bird this is!
We walked along the southern edge of Hoyt Lake and then we turned around and headed back. It was very quiet and serene, with only the sounds of a few joggers breaking the spell of nature and, beyond it, the sounds of traffic and a city waking up. We also saw the stage for Shakespeare In Delaware Park, which we have likewise never attended; I suppose we’ll have to see for ourselves someday if that cockpit can indeed hold the vasty fields of France.
On the way back, I stopped to pluck a single blossom, and after taking in the rising sunlight one last time, Cane and I headed home. We got back just a few minutes before my normal work day, had I worked yesterday, would have begun.
Not a bad way to pass a morning, even if I am still quite sure that I will never be a sunrise person.
Twice in recent weeks I have taken The Dee-oh-gee to Chestnut Ridge on our Sunday adventure-nature walks. Late spring and early summer are great times to go to this particular park, when things haven’t really started to heat up or dry out just yet.
From the top of the sledding hill, you have a wonderful view–if it’s clear–of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, ON in the distance.
Notable here is the Buffalo Skyway, visible at center to the left of downtown, and the white roof of the Ralph Wilson Field House, which is the practice facility for the Buffalo Bills.
I’ve walked past this spot many, many times–and only yesterday did I notice this old utility pole.Cue John Denver: “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy…!”I love when sunlight breaks through the canopy, fifty to a hundred feet up, to light up lower trees like this four-foot sapling.I don’t know if there’s a more evocative sight than a trail winding through the forest.Two adventurers!
These are from a few weeks ago:
Sun-dappled leaves.An old well-house. These structures, built by the Works Progress Administration, dot the park.Brand-new graffiti. I’m glad for Faith and Shane, though I wonder what role cheese has to play in their romance.A pine dotted with the year’s new growth.Sunlight, from source to terminus.One of many streams. This one usually dries up by mid-July.Cones weighing down the top of this great pine.The bib pocket on your overalls is a great place for a wildflower or two!Adventurers, again. A greyhound is a fantastic fashion accessory. (The shirt is from Oahu!)
